drothgery said:
FWIW, that's pretty much the only part of the country where it isn't much cheaper and much faster to rent a car or fly.
Yup; the "Northeast Corridor" Amtrak service is pretty good. It gets well-funded, is well-maintained, is very fast, and reasonably reliable.
In the rest of the country, Amtrak service is kind of a crapshoot. Amtrak leases time on freight railway tracks in most other places, and interference from freight trains frequently causes delays. There are certainly some scenic stretches on some routes, but a lot of it isn't terribly scenic. If you want a private room (especially nice if you're going to be overnighting on the train), it's usually an arm and a leg.
A little more background for the original poster: in the U.S., passenger trains used to be run by the individual (privately-owned) raliroads. In the early 1970s, many of the railroads were facing bankruptcy, and none of them were making any money running passenger trains, so the federal government created Amtrak, to continue national passenger train service. Amtrak has been a political football ever since its inception, and, as noted above, other than the Northeast Corridor, and a few other selected routes, it's not particularly well-used.
Beyond Amtrak, the only other passenger railroads in the U.S. are either commuter railroads (generally publically-owned, providing service to/from big cities from their suburbs), or tourist railroads (usually operating over fairly short stretches, often in scenic areas).
